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Instrumentalism About Practical Reason: Not by Default ∗ Thomas Schmidt

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Instrumentalism About Practical Reason: Not by Default ∗ Thomas Schmidt Philosophical Explorations, 2016 Vol. 19, No. 1, 17–27, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2015.1134632 Instrumentalism about practical reason: not by default ∗ Thomas Schmidt Department of Philosophy, Humboldt-Universita¨t zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany (Received 25 April 2014; final version received 12 December 2015) Instrumentalism is the view that all requirements of practical reason can be derived from the instrumental principle, that is, from the claim that one ought to take the suitable means to one’s ends. Rationalists, by contrast, hold that there are requirements of practical reason that concern the normative acceptability of ends. To the extent that rationalists put forward these requirements in addition to the instrumental principle, rationalism might seem to go beyond instrumentalism in its normative commitments. This is why it is sometimes thought that rationalism is stronger than instrumentalism in a way that entails that instrumentalism is the default view, while rationalists carry the burden of proof. In this paper, I explore and discuss different ways of spelling out this idea. I argue that rationalism is not stronger than instrumentalism in a way that has implications for matters of justification and differences in prima facie defensibility of the two sorts of views. Keywords: instrumentalism; instrumental principle; rationalism; practical reason; normativity 1. Instrumentalism vs. rationalism Instrumentalism is the view that all requirements of practical reason can be derived from the instrumental principle, that is, from the following claim: (IP) one ought to take the suitable means to one’s ends.1,2 When it comes to spelling out a defensible version of instrumentalism, complications Downloaded by [Thomas Schmidt] at 00:03 06 April 2016 abound. Cases of morally outrageous or otherwise seemingly unacceptable ends and cases of ends the realisation of which would frustrate the agent are among the stumbling blocks for instrumentalists that any reasonably detailed formulation of instrumentalism needs to be able to deal with. In response to such problems, instrumentalists have come up with a number of refinements of their view that are subject to discussion in the literature. Even though it is controversial on grounds of considerations about normative accept- ability whether a convincing conception of instrumentalism can be worked out, there seem to be, at least at first sight, important asymmetries in philosophical ambition between instrumentalism and rationalism, its main theoretical competitor. Rationalism is thought to be more ambitious to the extent that it involves a commitment to some version of the instrumental principle, as does instrumentalism, but goes beyond what is common ground between the two types of views. Whereas instrumentalists hold that all requirements of practical reason can be derived from (IP), rationalists of the sort just ∗Email: [email protected] # 2016 Taylor & Francis 18 Thomas Schmidt characterised believe that in addition to (IP), there are substantial requirements of practical reason that concern the normative acceptability of ends.3 Both instrumentalism and ration- alism should be understood as involving the view that actions that are neither required nor prohibited by reason are rationally permitted. Versions of rationalism that also uphold the instrumental principle (in addition to the substantial criteria normatively constraining the set of ends it is rationally permissible to pursue) would seem to be committed to farther reaching and, thus, stronger, claims than instrumentalism in a way which entails a theoretical advantage for instrumentalists. Con- sider, for example, the following remarks by Nozick: Instrumental rationality is within the intersection of all theories of rationality (and perhaps nothing else is). In this sense, instrumental rationality is the default theory, the theory that all discussants of rationality can take for granted, whatever else they think. [ ...]. The instru- mental theory of rationality does not seem to stand in need of justification, whereas every other theory does. (Nozick 1993, 133)4 If Nozick and those who share this view were right, then there would be a theoretically highly significant asymmetry between instrumentalism and rationalism due to purely struc- tural differences between the two types of view. However, the question whether such an asymmetry obtains has not been discussed in the literature in its own right. As I show in this paper, advances in the philosophical discussion about practical reason and normativity have interesting consequences for it. I argue that there is no sense of “stronger” in which rationalism is stronger than instrumentalism in a way that entails that rationalists are in greater need of justifying their view than instrumentalists in virtue of structural differences between the two views. In arguing that rationalism is not stronger than instrumentalism due to structural differ- ences between the two sorts of theories, I focus on a sense in which rationalism might seem to be theoretically more ambitious than instrumentalism, and which is furthermore different from other such senses that are often discussed in the literature. Many believe that ration- alism is more ambitious, or indeed false, due to the type of ought claims that rationalists, as opposed to instrumentalists, bring into play. Some hold, for instance, that rationalism is more ambitious than instrumentalism on the purported grounds that the instrumental prin- ciple can better be accommodated within a naturalist framework than characteristically rationalist ought claims. The traditional point of reference for the view that rationalists Downloaded by [Thomas Schmidt] at 00:03 06 April 2016 have a harder time explaining how their principles are tenable in the first place is, of course, Kant’s claim that categorical as opposed to hypothetical imperatives require specific philosophical underpinning. Others go further and believe that judgements about categori- cal requirements of practical reasons that are not contingent on antecedent desires or ends of an agent are all false. This is sometimes argued for with reference to the alleged “queerness” of categorical normative facts or of the epistemic faculty which one would need to assume in order to explain how knowledge about such facts is possible (Mackie 1977, 38–42). Others bring into play considerations about the structure and motivational force of practical deliberation (Williams 1979). Against such arguments, Korsgaard (1986) and Hampton (1998, ch. 4) have aimed at showing that there is no difference in type between the normative judgements that ration- alists, as opposed to instrumentalists, are committed to maintain that would make instru- mentalism more acceptable from a naturalistic point of view. It is controversial whether Korsgaard and Hampton have succeeded in establishing this claim, in particular in view of the recent forceful critique of their arguments by Schroeder (2007, 46–50, 56–83). Instrumentalism About Practical Reason: Not by Default 19 However, since the discussion provided in this paper takes up the question whether instru- mentalism is to be seen as the default theory due to purely structural differences between instrumentalism and rationalism, its focus is a different sort of asymmetry claim than the one at issue between Korsgaard and Hampton on the one hand and their opponents on the other. A further asymmetry claim that is not directly related to the discussion to follow is the view, defended by Dreier and others, that the instrumental principle has “a kind of sine qua non status” (Dreier 2001, 43), that is, that the instrumental principle needs to be assumed as a principle of practical reason if anything does, and that it is the only principle with this status. Even if this were so, however, this would only amount to a defence of the instrumen- tal principle, not of instrumentalism – and it is the dialectical situation concerning the latter that is at issue in this paper. (Consider, as an analogy, the claim that no soup not containing salt is seasoned appropriately – containing salt, then, is a sine qua non condition for accep- table soups. Even if this were so, it would not follow that soups only seasoned with salt should be seen as default, whereas all other ways of seasoning soups, involving salt but also other things – say, pepper – face a greater justificatory burden.) In what follows, I treat the dispute between instrumentalists and rationalists as a contro- versy about what one ought (or has reason) to do. I conceive this issue, in turn, as the subject matter of the theory of practical reason, or practical rationality (following many others, I use these terms interchangeably). Setting up things in this way has been the standard practice in practical philosophy at least until the late 1990s.5 In recent literature, however, many invoke a narrower notion of rationality according to which rationality is only concerned with the internal coherence of mental states, and regard it as an open question how this notion of rationality is related to oughts and reasons.6 Those who under- stand the notion of practical rationality in this narrow sense should see instrumentalism and rationalism as I discuss them here as theories about practical normativity – and not as theories about practical rationality. The structure of my argument is as follows. I begin by rejecting the view that rational- ism is stronger than instrumentalism in being the logically stronger theory of
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